[Intro] ... then just see what googly eyes that I stole a land from my daughter. I would be really happy if you find something, some inspiration. Hey there, Buschi here. In the last few projects I was focusing a lot on Home Assistant and how to enhance it using ESPHome, which is a software suite to produce custom-built firmware for the ESP chip families. I used it to create, for example, this light in a short and detailed how I did it and how it's built and how it's created. I created and made a video on this light, which I created from scratch, using keypad to produce my own PCB and put an ESP module on the backside of the PCB, which then controls the light strips. In the recent video I created a light sensor for my father, who has also a Home Assistant at home. And I remember now that I never gave him the sensor that I built for him in this video, explaining it in this video. Sorry that you will get it soon if you see that. So in short, I'm a big fan of Home Assistant and I'm a big fan of ESPHome and to be able to tinker with things and mix and match the small building blocks that ESP offers you and put it all together and it compiles a new firmware and you flash it and you get something new that is your own from scratch. And you know how the saying goes and all good things need to come to an end, but not so fast and not today. Does it even say where did it come from? Anyway, all good things need to come to an end, but not yet and not so fast because today I want to use ESPHome and tinker a little bit to steer stuff in the real world using stepper motors. If you're not familiar with what a stepper motor is, it's this. Usually in this bulky form, quite common in 3D printers these days, in the simplest form they have two coils. So this one has for example six pins, but you can control it in a two coil fashion. And if you reverse for example the polarity of one of the coils, that is called a step. It moves by a bit and that is actually not a huge amount, but for the NEMA standard stepper motor it's 1.8 degrees, which means that for a full revolution you need 200 steps. And now as such a motor as you can imagine draws quite an amount of power, you need special circuitries to control it. And for example this one, so they get really small but they can still drive quite an amount of amp, quite a high amount of amps. And in recent years they got really sophisticated. What I mean by that is that now you cannot only do full steps or half steps or quarter steps, a single step can be subdivided by for example 256 steps. And due to the subdivision also steps got really quiet. So in the good old days those things or rather the motors were singing really singing as if they were performing a... Ah, you again. What does it say? Ah, now. Now I can read it. Yeah, I like it. Do that. And nowadays you can barely hear them working at all. So without further ado I would say let's jump in and see how this can be done with an ESP home module and how difficult it is to set it up actually. And as a... Come on! Okay, I can definitely read it now, but this font is not so sophisticated in my opinion. So I hope the next time it's a nicer font. Yeah, let's see what is actually needed to use a stepper motor in ESP home. If you have no idea why I do this video and why tinkering with motors is actually interesting then just see what googly eyes that I stole land from my daughter do to an otherwise mundane disc from an earlier project. Isn't that cute? Motors always fascinated me. Don't know why. Well, I do. Because you can change something in the real world almost as if it was magic. Anyway, let's go back to the topic. As you can see there is not much to see really. There is the motor, the driver I see, and the ESP module carrier board plus power and power. The stepper motor driver has a few important inputs. Let's start with the power supply for the logic ground and VIO. VIO gets the same 3.3 logic level as the ESP to communicate on an I level, meaning the same logical voltage level. Then come the functional pins, step and direction pins. You guessed it, those are important. Step for advancing one step forwards or backwards controlled by the direction pin. If you want to let the motor stay in sleep mode during motions there is this enable line. Careful here, it is driven in inverted mode, meaning that a low level means enabled. Then I also hooked up the MCS1 to high level. They have a built-in pull down resistor so MCS2 is pulled down. According to the datasheet this is giving us a half step configuration, which explains why I need to step 400 times before a full revolution is finished as opposed to 200 steps with a full step configuration or the default of the motor itself. Finally I hooked up power to the motor and the four motor lines for the two coils. That's it. Let's have a small glimpse onto the config code. Okay, that's maybe a bit too small. Let's increase the size and ignore the boilerplate setup code that ESPHome adds for you and that I have shown multiple times before in other videos. We begin our tour at the stepper component. I have set up three pins for the step, the direction and the sleep pin and then three values for Mach speed, acceleration and deceleration. The latter two are not strictly necessary but a motor that gently starts and stops instantly levels up to level three on the coolness scale. Why level three and not four? I don't know. Go figure. That's already it for the motor. And then to be able to control the steps as an input variable from Home Assistant I added a number template with a range of possible values between zero and two thousand with a set action that sets the corresponding input steps via lambda function to the stepper component. And that's it. Again, so simple. I'm in the last steps of cutting up this video and I realized that I've never shown the contraption that was holding the pulleys that lowered and assigned gently in and out of the frame. And as this is quite impressive to look at, I thought it's a nice touch to show to you. So that's it. This thing was looming and hanging over my head the entire time. It consists of two pulleys that are attached to magic arms and those magic arms, so those are the magic arms, are attached to this big boom arm over here that is coming from a different project. An earlier one which is actually a camera stand. You can see the tripod head there. I linked you the video because I was building that and that's also a 3D printed part. I was never afraid that it might come crashing down onto my head because the PTG and the 3D printed parts are so strong and so nice and I love them. It was working just fine and I could position it in all possible ways. When you loosen the screws, it's moving in all possible directions and then only this pulley, not this this disc would go onto the stepper motor, turning and moving the two strings together. And then this was moving the sign up and down. So no big deal, but in my opinion this is. And that brings us to the end of this video. I had a lot of fun tinkering with ESP Home again and in that case changing stuff in the real world using a stepper motor. ESP Home still amazes me and I find it astonishing how many different building blocks there are and what you can actually all do in your own DIY projects to achieve things that would be otherwise really hard to achieve. And if you like this video and you found it interesting then do this. And if you could leave a thumbs up for example, I would be really appreciating it. I leave you to it, have a good one, see you soon. Bye!